This specification relates to transliteration systems.
Transliteration systems generate transliterations of words. A word written in a first writing system is transliterated to a transliteration written in a second writing system by mapping characters (or groups of characters) to corresponding transliterated characters.
Conventional transliteration systems apply transliteration rules to the characters of input words to generate transliterated words. In some transliteration systems, each rule has an associated weight. When multiple sets of rules can be used to generate multiple transliterations of a given word, the weights of the rules are used to select the best transliteration. The weights are generally configured by hand. The hand-configuration of weights is a time-consuming process. In addition, the resulting weights are not always optimal. Weights are not optimal when they lead to incorrect transliterations more than they lead to correct transliterations, or more often than other weights would do.